Topic: Derivation

These resources cover the ways in which new words can be formed, for example by joining two words together or adding an ending to a word. These processes increase the vocabulary of our language, and an understanding of these processes can be helpful in expanding our personal vocabulary knowledge.

In this activity, students work with an interactive smart board display to build compound words.

The Activity pages for this starter can be found in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. Each Activity page contains slides that can be displayed using a projector or smart board.

In this activity, students analyse neoclassical compounds, which are compounds where often the word elements were taken from the classical
languages (ancient Greek and Latin) and were combined in new ways in
English (the element neo- comes from the Greek for ‘new’). Neoclassical compounds involve combining forms. They are meaningful elements drawn from Greek and Latin, which can combine with other elements to form words.

Lesson Plan

In this activity, explore how words are built out of a prefix, base form and a suffix.

What meanings do different prefixes and suffixes have? Can any base form take any prefix or suffix? How can you manipulate language to create new forms? For example, deread is not an English word. What might it mean?

In this lesson, students explore word morphology. Morphology is an area of language study concerned with how words are
formed. While syntax is about the larger structures formed when words
are put together, morphology is about the structure within words.

New words are being generated at a rapid speed and there has been a huge upsurge in the number of new words being considered for inclusion in dictionaries. A fairly limited number of word formation processes are responsible for these new words. In our suggested mini-project, students look at a range of examples, and try to work out the key patterns of word formation that are responsible. This makes a good starting point for a detailed investigation of new words.

Suffixes cause many of our common spelling mistakes. One challenge is simply to know which is correct: for example, legible
or legable? In fact, −ible and −able serve the same function, and sound the same. As a matter of history, -ible entered English from Latin, while −able entered English from French, but there’s no easy rule for knowing when to use which suffix. Each word with each suffix just requires practice.